Dave Smith Mopho goes Keerazy with Random Patch Generator

The Mopho Pro Editor is like any other editor for external MIDI instruments: It’s kind of buggy and ill-documented, and half the time something about it doesn’t work and you can’t figure out why. But when it does work, two features make it extremely valuable: The random patch generator and the ‘program genetics.’

The former is what it sounds like — it generates random patches, and you can control which parameters it randomizes. The ‘program genetics’ starts from two existing Mopho patches and ‘breeds’ them to generate new patches. The cool thing about these two features is that it generates sounds you’d never program on purpose; and in fact, I’m frankly mystified about how the Mopho’s fairly straightforward architecture could even make the sounds it does.

Example #1 — an assortment of generated patches, one after another, with tweaking: